Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) has annulled volume discounts for its largest customers and raised prices amid overwhelming demands for its services, a media report claims. Other contract makers of semiconductors reportedly did the same in recent months.
I wonder if the impact will be noticed by most. Tomshardware seems to claim these discounts were under 3%:
TSMC's largest customers also happen to use its most advanced fabrication process, so select clients of the foundry receive discounts for the 300mm processed wafers they purchase. TSMC's discount prices fell within 3%, but the world's largest contract maker of semiconductors had decided to cease discounts starting next year, reports Taiwanese Central News Agency.
Regardless, with GlobalFoundries leaving the race for sub-14nm and EUV, and Intel's foundries getting behind to the point that they need TSMC to produce their GPUs, I guess this enormous void in the supply of high-end nodes was sure to result in this.
Of course, in a year where every company + their dogs saw the need to accelerate their plans for digitalization I'm sure this also resulted in a significantly higher demand for CPUs, GPUs and SoCs.
It's not just the discounts unless I'm misunderstanding - they're also raising prices (undisclosed, naturally) similar to other fabs.
Maybe it'll be felt in the next wave of products as we've already got pricing for current line-ups, which would have been inked in deals already.
Then again, maybe they're going after the ones making gigantic orders like Apple. Not sure if consoles apply or not, but certainly millions of chips is nothing to sneeze at. I'm not too familiar with GPU shipment numbers though.
